Förutom den separata intervjun kan man läsa mer om boken och familjen Kurisu och andra här. “Numerous other accounts show the side of Rand that her critics pretend didn’t exist—her benevolence. We read of children who meet Rand and said she was kind to them and would actually stay in touch with them, often calling them to see how they were doing. Another girl recounts how she lived with Ayn and Frank in a one-bedroom apartment when her parents were having marital problems. Over and over individuals recount an Ayn Rand who was benevolent and gentle.”

”Much of the plot of Atlas Shrugged can be understood as interlocking story arcs about love and friendship.”[…]

”So if you look at Atlas just as a political parable or an economic manifesto, then complain that it’s two-dimensional, that’s because there’s a whole other level of the plot that you’re missing.”[…]

”So the answer to the paradox is that Ayn Rand doesn’t care about money so much as she cares about the things that give money value: creation, production, and the qualities of character that make it possible to create and produce.

It’s amusing that a lot of same people who talk about Ayn Rand looking down on the poor or wanting to crush the weak also complain that her writing lacks subtlety. Yet themes like this are right out there in the open, and they blithely skip over them. Apparently, it’s a little too subtle for them.”[…]

”Love is about shared values, including the value of loving the truth, loving this world, and wanting to build and create. So are Ayn Rand heroes out to make money? Yes, eventually—after they have achieved the virtues that make money possible.”

Timothy Sandefur har på sin blogg listat ”Ten truths that changed American history”, med anledning av en lista på ”Ten lies that made American history”. Sandefur skriver: ”Some people enjoy emphasizing the “lies” of American history—and of course it is important to keep the dark side of our past in mind, and to remember how crucial skepticism is in a democracy. On the other hand, reverence is important, too, and an overemphasis on “the lies” can mislead, and can feed an ugly character trait: the self-flattering notion that you’re far too smart to fall for idealism.

Of course, our history and culture have also been profoundly shaped by great truths—and telling those truths often took far more courage than the opposite. At this time of year, especially, it’s worth pausing to think about ten great truths that changed, and continue to change, the United States.”

”Much of Rand’s work, I said, was about the moral status of the individual human soul in an age of mediocrity. What turned individuals away from Ayn Rand was not her atheism, not her defense of laissez-faire capitalism or even her rational demolition of altruism. It was something more visceral. It was their complicity in the destruction of the noblest and most idealistic sense of life that lay within their own souls. Somewhere along the way they told themselves that they had grown up. What they had done, though, tragically, was to annihilate the capacity to hold steadily to a vision of life’s better possibilities and their ability to be the chief engines of change within their own lives.

They had become disillusioned with life largely because they had bought into a cult of appeasement that seduced them into accepting the false idea that to get ahead required compromises, while Rand advocated an unbreachable commitment to one’s values and an equal commitment to the morally unimpeachable character that is required to uphold and preserve such values.

People think of Ayn Rand, I am convinced, 30 years after encountering and studying her philosophy and after deeply observing her detractors, and they feel retrospective shame and guilt over abandoning their idealistic selves — the sense of immeasurable benevolence and optimism they had known at 16 and irrevocably lost, a loss that cost them their vitality and a purpose for living on earth. Celebrating exaltation, heroism and achievement they had learned to sacrifice the best within themselves for a non-recuperable price. Once you you’ve sold your soul, it is no longer yours. You cannot recover it. In enshrining mediocrity such individuals had alienated themselves further from their deepest potential.

Ayn Rand, I submitted, was the penultimate scapegoat of our age who was routinely hated for her stylized creation of a wondrous universe in an age where too many people were polluting it with their unbridled vulgarity and mindless narcissism.

In one sense, she was the quintessential American novelist and thinker. She advocated self-reliance, rugged individualism, limited government, American optimism and benevolence and the can-do-attitude that is the unprecedented hallmark of American exceptionality. On the other hand — and this is part of why she is resented by many so-called progressives and conservatives alike — her philosophical sensibilities are truly outside the mainstream of Anglo-American analytic philosophy. At heart, she represented an aristocracy of the soul and of the mind, a perceived elitism by some; however, if that catchphrase has any conceptual resonance — it was an elitism to which all were invited provided they were willing to do the consistent thinking that will always be required of anyone who wishes to live as a human being.”

”It was Ayn Rand who first convinced me of the reasonableness of natural rights; and though I have read extensively in this field for well over four decades—more extensively, I daresay, than any of her libertarian critics—I remain with the lady who brought me to the dance.”